Targeting can be defined as being able to clearly define your audience; Targeting allows brands focus their spend and brand message (content) on a specific market by narrowing down the audience and defining those people who are most likely to buy. The goal is to craft a message which is relevant to our clients. It is about reaching the right customers, with the right message, at the right time! Targeting is very important when creating your digital marketing strategy.

So here are 10 easy steps we outlined to help you know your target audience and understand your customers better.

Challenge your assumptions

Do not assume that you know who your target audience is; sometimes you might have ignored certain target groups so you need to research and do proper analysis before you select your target market.

Learn from others:

keep Researching. Read up case studies and examples by marketers, recent industry reports, general market research and more, read as much as you can as all this information will help you along the way.

Create a Persona for customers:

After collecting enough objective data, start creating a customer persona that includes characteristics like age, sex, education, and income (basically look into Demographics). You also need to include factors like temperament, sensitivity, attitudes, values, opinions and more (they all fall under the segmentation tool called Psychographics).

Conduct Quantitative surveys:

Quantitative surveys will help to back up all your initial assumptions. It will help you understand your audience’s habits and more. The surveys should be done on a large scale and most of the questions asked should be in a multiple choice format.

Conduct Qualitative surveys:

Qualitative research will give you a more detailed insight on your audience as it is done on a smaller scale. It targets a small sample of audience members and it involves using open-ended questions in a bid to get longer responses that can be interpreted.

Learn from your Competitors:

A lot of your competitors have already done their market research, to observe and learn from them. Pay attention to how they advertise to their customers

Look to Popular brands/products:

Find out about products/services that are unrelated to your industry that your target audience loves. After doing this look into how these brands position themselves, pay attention to the type of content they put out, their adverts, marketing strategies and more.

Pay attention to social conversations:

Customers say a lot online about products and brands so you need to be social media savvy, use social listening software’s to zero in on what customers are saying online or work closely with a digital marketing agency to help build an online community for your brand.

Examine interactions with your brand:

Use Google analytics and other tools to help examine user behavior and interactions with your brand and website.

Have room for growth:

It’s impossible for any brand to say that they have a perfect understanding of their target audience as the market keeps evolving and growing so be prepared for change but always strive to understand your audience as they will make or mar your brand.

It’s important to note that none of these steps work independently. Keep collecting information from other sources and use them collectively to create a comprehensive analysis of who your target audience is.